Tag: parody band

Ever fast food-themed Black Sabbath tribute band Mac Sabbath crawled out of the greasy muck at the bottom of a McDonald’s fryer, we here at Weird Band HQ have been longing for the moment you’re about to see. Yes, Ozzy Osbourne has finally been to a Mac Sabbath concert — and it came courtesy of his son Jack, who surprised his dad with it as a segment for their A&E channel reality show, Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour. I’m not sure whether the segment has aired, or will ever air, though I think the producers would be crazy to omit it. But Mac Sabbath posted it last week to their YouTube channel and Ozzy’s reaction to the whole thing is priceless. His final verdict? “Funny as fuck, that.” As usual, Ozzy speaks the truth.

Mac Sabbath play a hometown show at the Fonda Theatre on Friday, Dec. 28th with an excellently weird lineup, including The Dickies, PPL MVR and Captured! by Robots. Tragically, I will not be able to go, which is all the more reason why I hope you, dear readers, can go and take lots of pictures and rub it in my face that I wasn’t there. I’m counting on you!

Every once in awhile, a new weird band comes along with a concept that is so completely fucking brilliant, you can’t believe no one else thought of it sooner. That was the reaction we first had when a friend of ours here in L.A. invited us to see a McDonald’s-themed Black Sabbath cover band called…wait for it…Mac Sabbath! Genius, right?

It was so genius that we were sure they must suck…no idea could be that clever and well-executed. Turns out we needn’t have worried. You’re in good, puffy clown hands with Mac Sabbath…those hands belonging to one Mike Odd, the same twisted visionary behind another of our favorite weird local bands, Rosemary’s Billygoat. (Officially, Mike Odd is just Mac Sabbath’s manager. But let’s just say that must be Mike’s brother under the “Ronald Osbourne” makeup, because the resemblance is uncanny.)

We were apparently fortunate enough, by pure dumb luck, to attend Mac Sabbath’s first-ever live performance (blurry photographic evidence below) back in July and it was fucking amazing. Hamburglar came out first, tossing hamburgers at the audience as he took his place behind the drum kit. Then came the guitar player, Mayor Slayer McCheese, horns protruding from his cheeseburger mouth like he just ate a whole steer. Then came Grimace, and of COURSE Grimace plays the fucking bass. Most bass players have a little Grimace in them. If you painted my high school garage band’s bass player purple, he’d basically be Grimace with slightly more hair.

Ronald Mc…sorry, Osbourne, came out sporting red and yellow fringed sleeves and took up position behind a mic stand shaped like a giant milkshake straw. The band launched into “Sweet Beef” and the rewritten Sabbath songs just got more ridiculous from there: “Frying Pan” instead of “Iron Man,” “Pair-a-buns” instead of “Paranoid,” you get the idea. I’m pretty sure “Rat Salad” is still just “Rat Salad,” though.

The highlight came when Ronald reached into his takeout bag, pulled out a hamburger with bat wings, and took a massive bite out of it. Or maybe the highlight was when he started using a giant straw to sneak slurps of audience members’ drinks. Or maybe the highlight was just watching Grimace play the bass. Seriously, I could not get over that part.

I’ll leave you with a live video of the band performing “Frying Pan,” complete with subtitles so you can appreciate the full hilarity of what Mike Odd and company have aptly dubbed “Drive Thru Metal.” Supersize me, Mac Sabbath!

Oh and here’s our bragging-rights photo of their very first performance:

Meet our latest poll winners: Heiter bis Wolkig, self-described purveyors of “weird German cabaret bullshit.” And when it’s German bullshit, you better bring a plunger. That sausage and sauerkraut diet is murder on the ol’ gut pipes, if you catch my drift.

Anyway, we actually don’t know much about these guys, because they didn’t tell us much and nearly everything that’s been written online about them is in German. But hey, Google Translator to the rescue!

Apparently, Heiter bis Wolkig started way back in the ’80s as some kind of college theater art prank. A bunch of schoolmates from Cologne started making parody songs as part of a cabaret night and I guess things kinda just snowballed from there. They even had a sorta-hit in 1992 with a song called “Hey Rote Zora,” a parody of “Here Comes Pippi Longstocking.” If you speak German, I guess it’s fucking hysterical… although even for us non-Germans, the part where it turns into a snot-punk rave-up is pretty fun stuff.

In case you’re wondering, Heiter bis Wolkig either means “Partly Sunny” or “Partly Cloudy” or possibly both those things, because Germans are complicated.

Back in the day, Heiter bis Wolkig was a whole gang, but only two of them, Marco and Micha, have been crazy enough to keep at it into their forties. God bless ’em, right? Seems like they revived Heiter bis Wolkig in 2012 after a long hiatus with a couple of releases: a “maxi-CD” called Pop Ma$$akker and a single called “Generation D.” No, I don’t know what a maxi-CD is, either. It’s either a CD that doubles as a tampon or it’s what we Americans call an EP or “extended play” release.

Anyway, Heiter bis Wolkig’s new stuff is still super-satirical, but it covers more ground genre-wise. Here they are making fun Lady Gaga-style electro-pop, while running around London in fat suits because I have no idea why:

Actually, maybe “satirical” isn’t the right word for lyrics like “Stupid Gaga music for fucking silly skanks.” How about we just call it put-down pop? That’s catchy, right?

Here they are making fun of pop-punk. Yeah, they’re shooting fish in barrels here, but there’s something ever so slightly off about the whole thing that makes it just downright delightful. Also, they throw in a “fucking motherfucker” madrigal interlude, just cuz. And they’re wearing white jumpsuits that say “ZOMBIEPROOF” on them. Because fans of pop-punk are a bunch of fucking zombies, I guess? I dunno, the fact that half of it makes no sense at all is what makes it work.

And finally, here’s the German version of their Lady Gaga parody, which honestly works even better than the English version. Side note: Back in my skate-punk days, I totally used to own that baseball cap.

So anyway, congrats on winning our poll, Heiter bis Wolkig! We look forward to you shitting on other forms of music us Americans love soon. Maybe dubstep? Dubstep is always a good target.

Austin’s Automusik strive to hold down the title of World’s Most Generic Pop Band. Their official bio describes them as “a moderately priced musikal entity”; their members are known only by job titles like Female Rock Unit Number One and Visual Viewing Unit Number Four; most of their songs, like “General Masses,” are heavy-handed parodies of trashy, mass-marketed pop and the vapid stars that produce it. It’s like if Kraftwerk were forced to turn themselves into a Lady Gaga tribute band, but couldn’t disguise their contempt for “Paparazzi.”

None of that, however, is what makes Automusik kind of awesome. What makes them kind of awesome is when they go off the We-Are-Pop-Shit-Robots script and produce truly bizarre gems like “Everything Is for the Baby.” Please to enjoy.

There’s kind of a long story behind how we stumbled across today’s band, so bear with me. It all started when a reader named Steve posted about 87 suggestions for bands we haven’t featured yet. Most of them we’d either heard of or (sorry, Steve) didn’t sound all that interesting, but one jumped out at us. Partially because the band’s name is—pardon me while I copy-paste this shit—Omphalectoicxanthopsia. And partially because Steve, after obsessively including links and/or long descriptions of every other band he mentioned (if you’re really bored, you can read his whole post on our Submit & Vote page), suddenly got all cryptic on us.

“A friend told me they were weird,” Steve wrote. “so I googled them, saw some weird pictures, and just thought ‘I’m staying the hell away from that.'” And you know us. Anything that makes normal people (and even weirdos like Steve) say “I’m staying the hell away from that”—we dive into it like it’s a swimming pool full of unicorns and rainbows.

So we too Googled Omphawhatchamacallit, and here’s where it gets interesting. It turns out that this band makes something that even I, degenerate that I am, had never heard of before called “pornogrind.” (They also call it “pornoise,” but that seems to be a term they just made up.) And they’re not the only ones. There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of bands out there tagging their music as “pornogrind.” Apparently I lead a very sheltered life.

At first, based on the first tracks of Omphalectohforfuckssake we could find, I thought pornogrind was just a really harsh form of grindcore on which everything’s so sped up that it just sounds like an ugly smear of ear-fucking noise. That’s basically what their tracks all sounded like, although one did have a wacky acoustic guitar solo buried in it. Then we Googled “pornogrind” and learned that—duh—it’s basically exactly what it sounds like: Grindcore with really, really foul porn-related band names, song titles and I guess lyrics—although the lyrics are without fail completely unintelligible because they’re delivered in that guttural Cookie Monster style that afflicts so much bad metal these days.

Anyway, long story short, there’s a LOT of these pornogrind bands floating around out there in cyberspace, and after you spend a few hours Googling their names for more info, you’re going to have to spend many more hours clearing your browser history so your girlfriend doesn’t kick you out of the house. Most of the search results for things like “Enema Bath” and “Cock and Ball Torture” (yes, actual band names) are not music-related, is what I’m saying. You have been warned.

Still, we plowed through as many of these pornogrind bands as we could stomach because, hey, the whole damn genre is pretty weird and hey, when you see this much horseshit in one place, there’s just gotta be a pony in there somewhere, right??

Well, no. Here’s the thing about pornogrind: It sucks. All of it. It’s just sped-up death metal/grindcore noise with porn samples and titles like “Anal Cum Shot” and “Regurgitated Semen.” In a way, it’s actually the opposite of weird—it’s the sort of shit 10-year-old boys dream up to gross out their friends, played in a we’re-just-pounding-the-fuck-out-of-our-instruments style almost totally lacking in any of the more technical aspects of true grindcore and extreme metal. It’s probably all meant to be funny on some level, but listen to enough of it and—much like actual porn—it just becomes depressing. Who spends days, weeks and months of their lives writing, rehearsing and recording music in their garage, and then decides, “Hey guys, let’s call ourselves Engorged Vaginal Abyss (yes, another actual band name) and write songs about raping strippers”? Sad people, that’s who.

It was in this context that we stumbled across Rancid Penguin Molestation and their pornogrind parody song/video, “Placenta Pudding Polka.” After all the necrophilia and pedophilia and coprophilia and whatever-philia, it was like a breath of fresh air. Actually, Rancid Penguin Molestation appears to be the work of just one man, a dude from Wisconsin named Cody. Here’s his MySpace page[Update: It’s apparently since been deleted] on which he declares that “Except for grindcore, I detest anything else that ends with a -core.” Amen to that, brother!

So thanks, reader Steve, for sending us down this particular internet rabbit hole and indirectly leading us to so-stupid-it’s-awesome charms of Rancid Penguin Molestation. And in case I wasn’t clear on this point: No, we won’t be featuring any more pornogrind bands. So don’t even ask.

P.S. No, we’re still not sure how being “fart raped” differs from being actually raped. Pretty sure we don’t want to find out though.